If you're a Lefty like us, the Democrats are not your friends

Reds Archives

October 27, 2010

The Fourth International Bake-Off

SMBIVA's own dear comrade, Uncle Al Moray Shutzmien, the generalissimo
of all well-patterned iron filings, recently buried
this link inside one of his devilishly sincere auto-buffets.
I thought it deserved a fuller broader more prominent venue.

The dateline appears to be April 1, 2009. If you think I'm
aiding in a hoax here... well... so be it!

"Today the anarchist space in my city got a package in the mail from
Mexico. It came with a flat, cardboardesque peanut butter cookie and
a letter stating that the cookie was made from the stolen remains of
Leon Trotsky.

It came with the following letter, translated from Spanish,
reproduced here exactly as it was written:

To whom it may concern,

The cookies that you have in their hands contain in them the current
remainders of Leon Trotsky, Bureaucracy Grandfather Toad. They were
taken in 20 of March 2009 -- almost the anniversary of the
suppression of the rebelion of Krondstadt -- by a robbery launched on
its museum in the City of Mexico, D.F.

For some, these remainders are sacred. They are the physical
remainders of a revolutionary martyr who incorporate the idea of a
proletarian fight of the masses toward a forumlaic triumph and
historic determined. For other, these remainders are profane. They
are the remainders of a murderer, burocrat, and usurper of authentic
rebellion. The two perspectives, nevertheless, they share the museum
as a standard of value, the only question being whether Trotsky
deserves display.

Everything that enter to museums are frozen and without life,
transformed to dead objects that raise up and against us. To get, to
bake, and to consume Trotsky as cookie, we are acting with history on
our terms. We give life to the lifeless along with the fights and
tensions incorporated inside. We are Gods. If Trotsky, however, was
correct about history, then the fact that his remainders are now
dessert was written in the fabric of the October Revolucion, and we
are the only messengers.

The holy communion has served as a spiritual nourishment for the
expresion of obedience to the God consumed. Alternative, the
consumption of the flesh of an enemy has been seen like the method of
absorbing the force of an adversary. In the two interpretations,
nevertheless, the final resting place is in shit. We do not want to
venerate this God or to absorb its power. To consume these cookies is
not to free us of the legacy of Trotsky, but to affirm our
superiority over the dead things that to dominate us. When the dead
enslave us by acting as the historic artifacts of ideology, we would
prefer that they are appropriated by the hostile forces of our
imagination and become in desserts.

We are keeping a few cookies with us. Whoever that assaults the next
museum, whoever that throw the next bullet to history, whoever
rekindles the rebellions that give us life -- we will send them one.
Good luck."

Another purported communique from the Trotskyphagoi, on a different
site, confessed that the cookies were a little "sandy."

November 15, 2010

Comrade High Road

"...one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis
with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy prey for free-floating
international capital, which can play one state against the other. More than
ever, the reply to every crisis should be more internationalist and universalist
than the universality of global capital."

Several SMBIVA redskins find this slippery Slav a tar baby. I join them in this
conclusion; he's best avoided, but I made the mistake of reading this and now i
have the above pile of droppings so clearly in focus that I've just got to step in
it and take a swing at him.

Exercising the soveign powers of the
nation state is a "retreat"?
Remember, this is aimed at advanced Euro societies now, not Nepal. In fact,
the full use of national credit systems alone, once decoupled from the
international network,
is well able to remove the nasty outcome Ziz raises -- "easy prey for
free floating international capital."

Guru Zizoomski wants us to believe that
such an essay in updated national liberation exacerbates transnational
corporate exploitation and manipulation. In his cutting-edge conception
of class struggle he becomes an "objective" shill for the
multinational corporate regime!

Obviously, it's only as part of the MNCs' network
that "international capital" can really "play one state against another."
The collective "instinct" to throw off the transnational corporate drag nets is
not untutored folly, it's sound as hell.

Break free, brothers and sisters! Slam shut the import doors! No more free entry,
no more global capital inflows! Build national economic self-reliance,
energy independence, an autonomous financia system! Inaugurate a
massive reindustrialization policy, reconstruct your national production
platform, become a greenhouse called Eden. All this is as plain as the nose on Sarko's
face.

These are the concrete forms of the present class struggle in Europe and this
wizard wants the Euro job class to disdain them as a cul de sac, in fact worse
than a cul de sac,
a form of capitulation to the existing social formation.

So why would our man here reject this intuitively obvious broadly shared
project? I suspect primarily it's his learned ignorance, his ethereal roaming
among the groves of pink humanist letters. Above all, it's about a pigeon-like
incomprehension of the self-developing, self-transforming possibilities
of any modern "national" economy.

As a consequence here he is imploring the jobblin' frogs of Europe to keep their
ever more heated national pots right over the international fire,
foreswear the reform struggles, and instead create liberated spaces of the social
"mind".

To me this amounts to saying "just swim faster comrades, round and round the pot.
Motion alone will set you free. The impossible happens. To act as if you are free is to
be free."

Maybe I'm being a tad unfair, but if so then what
acts -- what concrete acts -- does Ziltchnikoff have in mind?

He paraphrases a fellow left sage:
"Building free domains at a distance from state power, subtracted from its reign
(like the early Solidarnosc in Poland), and only resisting by force state
attempts to crush and re-appropriate these ‘liberated zones’"
Hmm, what might that mean, here and now? But nope, that don't cut it anyway.
Sez Doctor Z: "Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now."

Sounds like
fun, eh? Liberation as a naked act of leaping into the unknown,
looking to perform the impossible. Okay, that might sound absurd, but it is an act
after all -- right? Do not go quietly into that badass night.

For Zibzack, seems an act -- a system-transgressive act, one must presume -- is, yes, just
an act. But it's more than an act sometimes, too.
Sometimes at the same time its acting leaps the actor and creates its own
preconditions. Sorta like in a time-machine movie.

We have learned a great deal from the last century of class struggle.
One thing seems quite obvious to me: the unit of liberation is the nation, and
the arena of struggle is the movements now that objectively batter the corporate
hegemon, not some abstract locationless free domain Shangri-La of the collective
mind, kept distant from the state by not really existing at all.

I agree with Zizek and just about all other red hot rad thinksters:
the destruction of the existing state -- no matter its form democratic or
otherwise -- is the necessary first step toward true societal sublation(*).
But revolution is not just around every corner. Part of Clio's righteous work is
the day to day battles within the confines of the existing institutions.

The mass battle against "international Yankee led capital" today in Europe
means, among much else, the breakup of the euro zone and the restoration
of full financial sovereignty to its nation-state members.
If that seems hideously sub-revolutionary, so be it. Hold your nose and dive
in, or find yourself a self-liberated freeform activated isolate operating a
safe distance from the state, and of course from the concrete movements that right now are making
tomorrow out of today.

Among other aquisitions we now have the discoveries of modern political economy,
and more particularly the technical know-how to sublate much more of market
earth's perennial contradictions. Like a hundred thousand clones of Perseus,
with these gifts let us charge forward to destroy the transnational Cetus ravaging
every coast on the planet.

-------------

(*) Even here I disagree completely with Dr Ziz -- the sublation only has
possibility if the collapse of the old regime is followed quickly enough by the
erection of a revolutionary party-led prole dictatorship,
a class dictatorship prepared to forcefully transform the existing rubble of the
old society into the structures of the new.